Counterculture Club

Here is another in the Christianity Today "Counterculture for the Common Good" series, this time from Frederica Mathewes-Green:

If you hang around with Christians, you find that the same topic keeps coming up in conversation: their worries about "the culture." Christians talk about sex and violence in popular entertainment. They talk about bias in news reporting. They talk about how their views are ignored or misrepresented. "The culture" appears to be an aggressive challenger to "the church," and Christians keep worrying what to do about it. You soon get the impression that Church Inc. and Culture Amalgamated are like two corporations confronting each other at a negotiating table. Over there sits Culture—huge, complex, and self-absorbed. It's powerful, dangerous, unpredictable, and turbulent. Church is smaller, anxious; it studies Culture, trying to figure out a way to weasel in.

But there are flaws in this picture. For one thing, neither party is as monolithic as it seems. There are many devout believers among the ranks of journalists and entertainers, and there are even more culture-consumers among the ranks of devout believers. Indeed, it's almost impossible to avoid absorbing this culture; if you sealed the windows, it would leak in under the door. I once heard a retreat leader say she'd attempted a "media fast," but found the gaudy world met her on every side. "I may be free in many ways," she said, "But I am not free to not know what Madonna is doing."

Furthermore, the church is not a corporation; rather, it is incorporate, or better, incarnate, carried in the vulnerable bodies of fallible individuals who love and follow Jesus Christ. The culture is even less of an organization. It is more like a photomosaic composed of tiny faces, faces of the millions of people—or billions, rather, thanks to the worldwide toxic leak of American entertainment—who are caught up in its path.

The influence of the culture on all those individuals, including Christians, is less like that of a formal institution and more like the weather. We can observe that, under current conditions, it's cloudy with a chance of cynicism. Crudity is up, nudity is holding steady, and there is a 60 percent chance that any recent movie will include a shot of a man urinating. Large fluffy clouds of sentimental spirituality are increasing on the horizon, but we have yet to see whether they will blow toward or away from Christian truth. Stay tuned for further developments.

As Mark Twain famously remarked, everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. I think much of our frustration is due to trying to steer the weather, rather than trying to reach individuals caught up in the storm...

Very good. Here's the whole thing. The first in the series is here.